Emerson has been a much neglected opportunity for
public discourse on gun rights and gun violence. Why it
has been neglected is a serious subject of inquiry. The
Emerson briefs are a essential resource for any
concerned citizen and serious student of the subject. All
briefs were filed by January, 2000. Oral arguments were
held in June, 2000. The Fifth Circuit did not come out
with a ruling until
October 16, 2001.

These articles are the most complete challenge by
professional scholars to
gun lobby/libertarian/extreme individualist arguments
developed in the self-proclaimed "Standard Model."
They greatly expand on the arguments made in the Potowmack
Institute's
amicus in US v. Emerson..
The amicus brief was filed in August, 1999.
The letter to
John Ashcroft of August 31, 2001, updates
the amicus to reflect subsequent events and further research.
These articles, however, fail to address what the NRA really
wants and what it argues for in federal court which is to
keep gun ownership outside of the knowledge and reach
of any and all government. Only Bellesiles' article mentions
the
"Return of Militia", the
inventory or militia resources including privately owned weapons
authorized by the
Militia Act of 1792, but
Bellesiles mentions the "Return of Militia" only in passing.
The "Return of Militia" is the central issue to what the
gun lobby/libertarians want and what the NRA argues for in
court. It defeats any notion that there was in the early
Republic a right to be armed outside of the law and
outside of the knowledge and reach of government.

expands on many of the points of political theory in the
Potowmack Institute amicus brief
in Emerson. The natural right to exercise force is the
one right that is alienated when entering political community.

Kennedy's statement provoked a strong reaction. This is
where real discussion on gun rights begins but the point
had no follow-up in the newsmedia or public discourse.

The reaction was immediate from extreme libertarian ideologue
John Lott who masquerades as an objective social scientist:"HCI links John Ascroft to Mass Murder," January 17, 2001, originally published in
Investors' Business Daily and picked up by the
Philadelphia Daily News.Other John Lott opinions. Nowhere does Lott address the fundamental relationship between citizen and state. Lott does not recognized that there is no conflict betweeen gun ownership for self-defense and accountability to public authority, nor does he appreciate that it is possible to have gun ownership for self-defense on the slippery to anarchy, but there is no individual right to self-defense in the state of anarchy. See
amicus, Section III.

Lott drew a response from Handgun Control president
Michael Barnes, editorial, Philadephia Daily News, January 23, 2001"The Anti-Gun Folks Fire Back"
It is noteworthy that Barnes' points were published in the
Philadephia Daily News not the "rabidly antigun"
Washington Post. The Potowmack Institute has
had a standing offer since 1993 to pay $100 to anyone who
could get Barnes' points published in the Washington Post
the NRA's most assiduous and determined protector from
embarrassment and its doctrine of political of liberty from
serious examination. Real efforts to address gun violence
will begin when the Washington Post prints in full
context what James Madison was really describing in Federalist
Paper No. 46 and makes an issue of why some people have to
be blatantly dishonest to make their case. Federalist No. 46 is
very visible in the
Emerson briefs and in the
Chicago-Kent articles.
Madison was not describing the civil
rights of private individuals to be armed outside
of the knowledge and reach of law and government.

Terence Jeffrey, editor of Human Events, reports and comments on
the usual misrepresentation of
Federalist Paper No. 46.
He mentions Sen. Feingold's senior thesis on the Second Amendment.
We have not been able to procure a copy of his thesis.

The VPC provides an important and useful analysis. The problem is the position
and reasoning that Ashcroft articulates has been around in its present form
for thirty years. This if the first time a gun control organization has made
a serious public challenge and refutation. The VPC is beholden to public health
strategies. It does not follow through from its decontruction to a firearms
policy based on fundamental concepts. See
.../vpc-reg.html.

A large number of law review articles related to Second Amendment
are on the Internet. These are overwhelmingly gun lobby and libertarian
articles. A list of articles is maintain by the
Second Amendment
Foundation.

Paul Revere was a patriot to the Revolution. He was a traitor to the King. Is it possible now to be both a patriot and a traitor to the Constitution?
Join the PRN Subscription list, a daily source of gun lobby news, information, and announcement.

The John Birch Society has many interesting observation on
the world in which we live. The NRA wants to be part of
the mainstream of American life and not marginalized like
the John Birch Society. The NRA needs to explain on what
terms its doctrine of political liberty is different from
that of the JBS. The JBS magazine The New American
had a confused cover story in its February 6,
1995, issue, which cites several gun lobby/libertarian
authors (Stephen Halbrook, David Hardy, Joyce Lee Malcolm),
"The Rise of Citizen Militias,",
William F. Jasper.
Jasper provides many standard gun lobby arguments and
references to
Federalist Papers Nos.
46, 29, but like
"Militias:Training for Doomsday...",
Gun News Digest, 1995, the article shows the
difficulty of reconciling the mystical individual
right with private armies.

"Liberty's Champion,",
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr., The New American,
February 6, 1995. Obituary of Murray Rothbard, the
primary formulator of the libertarian fantasy, included
in Appendix G of the Potowmack Institute's amicus
brief in US v. Emerson. In the same issue as
"The Rise of Citizen Militias" above.

This is the most complete statement of the gun lobby's ideology,
described as "pathbreaking"and for the "serious scholar."
It should be read along side of what Halbrook calls "the elementary
books of public right," some of which are
listed below. Halbrook provides 1306 footnotes
in 198 pages. That is not unusual for serious scholarship. It is
requisite for pseudoscholarship. Halbrook cites the elementary books
of public right most of which are available in many editions. He does
not name the edition he is citing from so it is difficult to check
his references. It is almost entertaining to see how Halbrook lifts
words out of context to prove his arguments when the words in context
have very little relation to what he wants to prove. The evolution of
political theory does not turn on an absolutist state and an armed
populace pointing guns at it, but this is the formulation of a true
believer. See
Locke
and FP No. 46, 29, and
Rehm. Halbrook's preposterous
doctrine of "libertarian republicanism" is critiqued in the
Potowmack Institute's
amicus curiae brief in US v. Emerson.

Now in paperback. Gingrich writes in his chapter on gun rights:
"The Second Amendment is a political right written into our
Constitution for the purpose of protecting individual citizens
from their own government" (p. 202). They sew the Constitution
into their shirts as a bullet proof vest. This is what we have
come to. Gingrich's words are cited in the Potowmack Institute
amicus brief in Emerson.

In a new culture war twist, Poe seems to want to
blame the feminists for destroying a warrior culture
by creating an emasculated culture where boys are
taught not to connect with gun ownership. Somehow
a gun in every pocket outside of the knowledge and reach of
law and government creates a warrior culture.
If Poe wants a warrior culture he should advocated
the original concept of the militia where all the
obligated men in society were conscripted into
militia duty and subjected to training and discipline.

B. Bruce-Briggs, "The Great American Gun War," The Public
Interest, Fall, 1976. Sympathetic to gun lobby. Often
quoted. The Public Interest refused copyright permission. Available in The Gun Control Debate, Ed. Lee Nisbet, Prometheus Books,
1990.

Vizzard's much neglected book provides the most complete analysis of
gun control politics. Vizzard outlines four paradigms for firearms policy: 1) crime control, 2) public health, 3) culture wars, 4) sovereignty. Crime control is what the politicians want to focus on. Public health is what the gun controllers and their centrist, establishment foundation supports have decide on, and culture wars is all the news media seem to be able to handle. The Potowmack Institute has been concerned from the beginning with sovereignty, the fundamental relationship between citizen and state. That is the issue we raised in our
amicus brief in Emerson. Vizzard writes (p. 9): "Although many Americans are ill at ease with the sovereignty and social order paradigm, it is likely the heart of the gun-control issue." It is the heart and failure to address it is the source of much more of a problem than simply gun violence. The failure means the business as usual of cynical, small-minded, obstructionist politics.

Except for the Violence Policy Center all the
gun control organizations support registration and
licensing. However, they have not developed an
intellectual justification for this policy goal and
aggressively followed it to its inevitable conclusion.
Registration and licensing
are the only effective means by which gun ownership and
use can be effectively regulated.

The Potowmack Institute has argued for years that the NRA works
very hard to make sure gun laws are poorly written and difficult
to enforce so it can proclaim gun laws do not work. It is all
part of a strategy. This report documents how the strategy has
worked for decades. The reports does not however describe the
NRA's
real problem. The NRA and its
gun lobby and libertarian allies cannot win in court the right
to be armed outside of accountability to public authority.
Failing in the courts, they can only have the armed populace
fantasy that all those guns in private hands
serve to maintain a balance of power between a
privately armed populace and any and all government
by defeating legislation. The gun rights agenda has
to rally a constituency by defeating or sabotaging
legislation. It succeeds because everyone else fails.
.../washpost.html,
.../397cong.html,
.../news.html,
.../bcabcnra.html,
.../196rehm.html,
.../sixtymin.html,
.../vpc-reg.html.

Other Handgun Control/Center to Prevent Handgun Violence files:

Legal Action Project Page
The Legal Action Project devotes its strategy to tort
law and appeals to victimhood not the fundamental
relationship between citizen and state.

The article appeared in 1991. The arguments parallel the
arguments developed by the Potowmack Institute and
presented to the Fifth Circuit in our
amicus brief in
Emerson. These arguments are
greatly expanded on in the Chicago-Kent Law Review
articles
above. The same
indications of a tendency toward anarchy emerged
in the Ashcroft hearings
above. The slippery
slope to anarchy is not central to Handgun Control's
public strategy and advocacy.

This effort was created and funded by billionaire Andrew McKelvey out of frustration with the strategy of existing gun control organizations. See
Billionaire's Gun Control Role Is Debated, Washington Post, April 27, 2001.
Anything that starts would with "gun safety" in its title is flawed
at conception. Addressing gun violence is not about gun safety.
It is about the fundamental relationship between citizen and state.
Americans for Gun Safety "supports the rights of individuals
who own firearms for sport, protection and collection."
However, "with rights come responsibilities."
Of course, we have to have "reasonable regulations."
The "rights" supported here are not distinquish from
the rights claimed by the gun lobby and the libertarians
which are the right to be armed outside of the law, the
right to individual sovereignty, and the right to insurrection.
The right to be armed outside of the law is the right
the NRA argues for in court. There is no mention of
US v. Emerson on the Americans for Gun Safety
website. As long as American for Gun Safety does not
address the fundamental relationship between citizen
and state, it will be another unproductive player
in progun/antigun culture war politics.

The Million Mom March, now combined with Handgun Control, Inc. into
The Brady Center

The MMM advocates registration and licensing but shows
no indication of educating a constituency on the
fundamental concepts. Without fundamental concepts,
MMM activity expresses little more than incoherent sentiments.
In "The Million Mom Moles", the NRA's Tanya
Metaksa may have a point that the Million Moms were
created by and are directed by the media and the
Democratic Party. The NRA and Metaksa need not worry.
The news media and the Democratic Party are not
threats to the armed populace fantasy. (This article
used to be on the FrontPage Magazine website but has
been removed.)

Mark Pitcavage provides probably the most
extensive links to militia related materials on the Internet.
He provides a long lists of references and links which readers
are encouraged to examine. It is not necessary to repeat them
here. His lengthy file with Sheldon Sheps,
"Militia - History and Law FAQ" is a valuable resource.
It covers much of the territory covered here. Pitcavage's PhD
dissertation at Ohio State, "An Equitable Burden: The Decline
of State Militias, 1783-1858" (1995) was completed at Ohio State
University in 1995. UMI order no. 9612259. tel. 800-521-0600.

John Kenneth Rowland, "Origins of the
Second Amendment: The Creation of the Constitutional Rights of
Militia and of Keeping and Bearing Arms," previously unpublished PhD
dissertation, Ohio State University, 1978, UMI order no. 7902218.
tel. 1-800-521-0600.

Relevant work of historical scholarship which is not mentioned in
any of the gunlobby/libertarian pseudoscholarship. Excerpts
provided at .../1197row.html.

John Kenneth Rowland, Appendix A, US v. Emerson, 1999, "Resetting the Terms of Debate on the Second Amendment:
New Light on the Original Meaning of the Phrase "to Bear Arms"
Based on 300 Historical Uses of the Term in a Military Contest
in Early America, 1618-1791."

The Standard Model is an abstraction divorced from a
specific historical context. At times it borders on an
intellectual game played by law professors swappping
quotations and citing one another. As one reads yet
again Justice Story's description of the militia as
the "palladium of liberty," one realizes that the
Standard Modellers are just shuffling the same
deck and dealing it out in a different order.

Bellesiles has been under much attack for accused faulty
or dishonest scholarship in his book The Arming of America.
There is plenty of other support outside of Bellesiles' thesis
and evidence that there was a shortage of guns in the early
Republic. See President Jefferson's comments on the
"Return of Militia," 1804.
There is not a similar examination of the gun lobby/libertarian
pseudoscholarship that has fabricated the armed populace doctrine.

The flaws in the Standard Model are emblematic of deeper
problems in the way history has been used by
constitutional scholars.9 Partisans of the Standard
Model have not only read constitutional texts in a
anachronistic fashion, but have also ignored important
historical sources vital to understanding what Federalists
and Anti-Federalists might have meant by the right to
bear arms. The structure of legal scholarship has
served to spread these errors rather than to contain
them. Once published, these errors enter the canons of
legal scholarship and are continuously recycled in article
after article.10 Upon closer inspection, the new
orthodoxy of the Second Amendment shares little with
the Standard Model employed by physicists. Indeed,
recent writing on the Second Amendment more closely
resembles the intellectual equivalent of a check kiting
scheme than it does solidly researched history.

...it is easier to fathom the motivations of the
National Rifle Association and Brady legislation
supporters than it is the dozens of those who
reside in the halls of ivy. To further complicate
matters, one finds both liberals and conservatives
on each side of the debate.

Second, the vast preponderance of these writings
have been by members of the legal fraternity. Their
approach has on the whole been narrowly legalistic, and
they have borrowed very heavily from each other,
recycling the same body of information. That
information often refers to the generalizations and
conclusions of their lawyer colleagues at other
institutions.

Chris Mooney quotes Garry Wills and Saul Cornell in "Showdown" on Linguafranca,
Which has been removed from the Internet.

Observing that law journals are generally run by squads of
students rather than peer reviewed, Cornell claims the
structure of legal scholarship has allowed the Standard
Modelers to recycle their errors tenfold because they
are insufficiently scrutinized before publication but
canonized afterward. "The standards for history in law
journals are just not the same as the standards for
historical scholarship in professional history journals,"
he declares. Garry Wills concurs, though he says he only
realized law journals were not peer reviewed after
lambasting the Standard Model in the
New York Review of Books.
"I was taking these people more seriously than I
perhaps should have, because I thought, 'Well, my God,
here are refereed journals,'" he says. "And it turns out
they're not."

Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of
Popular Sovereignty in England and American, WW Norton,
1988. Paperback.[Order From Amazon Today]

Very relevant. Chapter 7, "The People in Arms: The Invincible
Yeoman," critically examines the militia in theory and practice
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Morgan writes: "The
willing deference of men to their officers, in or out of uniform,
was of particular importance in America, because militia office
generally went hand-in-hand with political office and because the
American militia included all able-bodied free men, most of whom
were voters, conditioned by their militia service to support
their officers." The militia was part of the social system. The
gun lobby calls the militia the bulwark against tyranny. It was
a bulwark, but mostly an imaginary bulwark, against arbitrary
distant authority and against the rebellious instincts of the landless
rabble. When it came to combat the militiamen made poor
soldiers. General Washington and other Federalists despised
them. Washington built the Continental Army mostly out of
the landless rabble.

Long readable text. Theme is the dual nature of American
military: "...in the Constitution they [the Founders] retained the
dual military system bequeathed to the United States by its
history: a citizen solidery enrolled in the state militias, plus
a professional army of the type represented by the British army
or, more roughly, the Continental Army." Quoted in
Emerson amicus brief.

The Second Amendment and the Militia Act of 1792 do not make any
sense outside of a military context. They are miscontrewed now
to advance a contemporary rightwing fantasy.

Wills makes several points made by the Potowmack Institute. He
writes, "Time after time, in dreary expectable ways, the quotes
bandied about...turn out to be truncated, removed from context,
twisted, or applied to a debate different from that over the
Second Amendment." See "Abusing FP.
Nos. 46, 29" He also writes, "Yet the right
to overthrow government is not given by
government....Modern militias say the government itself instructs
them to overthrow government wacky
scholars endorse this view. They think the Constitution is
so deranged a document that it grants as the greatest crime a war
upon itself and then instructs its citizens to take this up.
According to this doctrine, a well-regulated group is meant to
overthrow its own regulator, and a soldier swearing to obey
orders is disqualified for true militia virtue."

Brown critiques
Milton Friedman's libertarian ideology in terms of the
foundations of public trust and civil society; Raises similar
issues from a different perspective as Newman below. Brown's
Chapter 1,
"The Sources of Disillusion,"
is now in our
Archive.

A comparative study of police departments and police abuse in Los
Angeles, New York, Sã o Paulo, Buenos Aires, Jamaica, and
Mexico City. When the rule of law and public trust break down
police abuse, paramilitary police activity and private armies are
inevitable outcomes.

Robert Alan Goldberg, Enemies Within:
The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America
, Yale University Press, 2001.[Order From Amazon
Today]

Irons' Chapter 19 is "The Spectre of Socialism." Half of the
e-mail received by the Potowmack Institute denounces touching
guns with laws as "socialism." In the period of Robber Baron
Capitalism the constitutional struggle was between "freedom of
contract" and the regulatory powers of the state in the interests
of public health, worker safety and the general welfare; Or,
the rights of property and the tyranny of democracy. The language
has reemerged in gun rights as the right to individual sovereignty
and socialism or the tyrannical encroachments of law and government.

Fukuyama describes public trust deriving from the rule of law
as providing the basis for modern economic systems. Once it is
lost it is very difficult to regain. Trust is very relevant to
this discussion. We are losing it.

Nicholas Kittrie, The War Against Authority: From Crisis of
Legitimacy to a New Social Contract, Johns Hopkins U. Press,
(1995). [Order From Amazon
Today]

Kittrie does not mention militias, the gun lobby or gun rights,
but he provides a useful historical overview of the struggle
between state authority and rebellion. This is generally a very
relevant discussion to the present political circumstance.

"The Right to Bear Arms," The Hon. Warren E. Burger,
Chief Justice of the United States (1969-86), Parade
magazine, January 14, 1990.

The late Chief Justice made simple proposals consistent with
those advocated by the Potowmack Institute. He could have said
more.

Government Print
"Gun Laws and the Need for Self-Defense"
Testimony before Subcommittee on Crime of the Committee on the
Judiciary of the US House of Representative, Part 2, April 5,
1995, Stock No. 552-070-193-54-5, $10, out of print.

Thomas David Konig, "
http://www.press.uillinois.edu/journals/lhr/Kon22_1.pdf
Thornton Anderson, Creating the Constitution: The Convention
of 1787 and the First Congress, Pa. St. U. Press, 1993.[Order From Amazon
Today]

The Constitution is a frame of government. Much
of the business of fleshing out a new government
was left up to the First Congress.

A recent history that puts the New Deal in perspective.
One cursory chapter on the
rightwing movement.

Dan T. Carter, The Politics of Rage George Wallace, the
Origins of the New Conservatism and the Transformation of
American Politics,[Order From Amazon Today]

Very relevant contemporary history of how the George
Wallace phenomenon showed the way to build the electoral base for
the rightwing movement.
Carter explains that the state level organizational support
for the Wallace campaigns was provided by the John Birch
Society, the Liberty Lobby, the White Citizens Councils
(in the Southern states), the Minutemen, among others.
The ideas and activism are still with us and many of the
ideas have become mainstream.

A critique of the New Deal from an interesting collaboration
between libertarian deliverer
Murray Rothbard and leftist students of William
Appleman Williams. The New Deal was not about socialist
revolution.

Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue
to the American Revolution, Oxford University Press,
1986. Paperback.[Order From Amazon Today]

This is a very relevant discussion. The ancestors of the NRA's
"armed citizen guerrillas" exercised
a basic right of freemen to take up arms to defeat an oppressive
government. George Washington's eighteenth century military
machine rounded them up and tried them for treason. The Whiskey
Rebellion in many respects was a replay of the American
Revolution. Where George the King failed to defend existing
governmental authority in 1774-76, George the President
succeeded. The militiamen in 1774-76 had a revolution. The
militiamen in 1794 did not.

Sidney Blumenthal, The Rise of the Counter-Establishment: From
Conservative Ideology to Political Power, 1986. Out of
print.[Order From Amazon Today]

Early treatment of the rightwing movement. Still valuable.
Blumenthal is an intimate of the Clintons and was more recently
pursued by the Starr investigation. His
Chapter 12, "The Second Coming,"
is now in our
Archive.

Lind has some strong paragraphs on the association between
the Republican Party and insurrectionists. He
makes strong assertions that the Republican Party as it
represents a conservative ideology is beholden to crackpot
fundamentalists and Stormtrooper militias for its electoral
appeal. Lind writes (p. 223): "Between 1983 and 1995, the
paramilitary right had changed from a fringe group into one of
the major constituencies of the Republican Party."

Lind gives the analysis that rightwing foundations have financed
much journalistic and scholarly research on policy and social
issues to advance the electoral appeal and credibility of the
rightwing movement. Without giving specific information, Lind
strengthens the long held suspicions of the Potowmack Institute
that much of the gun lobby/libertarian pseudoscholarship, mostly
published in law journals, that fortifies the armed populace
doctrine, is financed by rightwing foundations. This it seems
takes place outside of any input from the NRA. See
The Rightwing Movement.

Appealing to a crackpot fundamentalist constituency and a
Stormtrooper militia constituency are part of a cynical strategy
to gain electoral support for the agenda of rightwing
capitalism. This has become quite respectable and draws no
condemnation or critical examination.

Useful text book on the development of Western political concepts
and institutions in the modern age.

The History of Political Theory, George Sabine
(1880-1961), Fourth Edition, 1973, revised by Thomas Thorson.
Hardcover.[Order From Amazon Today]

At issue here are the most fundamental concepts of political
thought involving sovereignty and the consent to be governed.
Sabine is a classic text. It can be heavy going but it is worth
the effort for serious students. Use Sabine and McDonald as a
guide through these:

Halbrook above does not give the edition he used for footnotes.
It is necessary to search for the references. See
Abusing John Locke.
See Potowmack Institute
amicus brief in Emerson
for references to Locke. See Heyman
above for more references to Locke.